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Top: Jewish Atrocities: Qana: 1998 Qana Massacre
One year ago, on April 18, 1996 to be exact, 155 mm Israeli shells donated by Uncle Sam rained down on Lebanese men, women, and children taking refuge in a UN peace-keeping compound in Qana, southern Lebanon, to escape Israeli air, sea, and land bombardment of their towns and villages, and as a result, the bodies of 102 Arab civilians were shattered to pieces.
Leading up to the Qana massacre, 17 villages had been flattened, over a half million people had been rendered homeless, more than 200 had been murdered, and hundreds were wounded, in what was named as operation "Grapes of Wrath". Israeli Prime Minister Peres, who was granted the Nobel Prize for Peace, ordered the bombing blitz. The entire world, with the exception of the White House, condemned this barbaric attack conducted intentionally against defenseless civilians.
The UN compound in Qana has become a holocaust memorial to remind the world what Zionist Jews are capable of. The hangar where the lives of 102 victims were shattered to pieces has been left as it was. Bits of shrapnel, broken furniture, twisted metal, burned blankets, bloody toys are scattered on the floor. Nearby, the mass graves of these victims have been covered in black marble and decorated with portraits of the martyrs. Arabs and Muslims from every corner of the globe visit the site and promise the dead this ugly crime will never be forgotten. The time will come when the war criminals will be brought to justice and punished.
Butros Butros Ghali, (married to a Jewish woman), though he was an obedient servant of (the New World Order crowd), lost his job as a UN Secretary General. He was sacrificed at the altar of the Zionist masters who control the Oval Office. His only crime during his four years of service was the issuing of a mild UN report putting the blame for the Qana massacre on the Israeli government.
The UN commander, General Stanislaw Wozniak, rejected the Israeli lies and called the attack unacceptable. "Simply, you do not attack civilians. You do not attack UN positions," he emphasized.
The massacre was an act of deliberate terror aimed at punishing civilians for Tel-Aviv's failure to bring an end to Lebanese resistance and determination to liberate their lands from Israeli occupation.
Israeli military men who participated in the slaughter of Lebanese civilians said that the attack was justified; that they have no regrets; and that those who were killed were just "a bunch of Arabs" who lives are not important.
The Israeli military commander who led these men declared that this was a war and (they) must continue to fight like real fighters.
"We did our duty. They deserve to die because they are only Arabs." An Israeli soldier told "Kol Ha'Irr", an Israeli magazine, "I obeyed the orders. My conscience does not bother me at all. We should have fired more shells to kill more Arabs . . . One Arab more, one Arab less, you know.
Even the battery commander said that to us, "Any way, there are millions of Arabs."
Munira Taqi, who fled with her family to the UN compound in Qana from their home in Jebal Buttum a few miles away, lost her husband and an 8-year-old daughter. The mother, who was shielded by her husband, was wounded in the legs. While sitting beneath photos of her slain loved ones, she told newsmen who came to visit her:
"My child was on my lap and then she vanished. Shreds of her pajamas were all that was left."
Her surviving 7-year-old daughter walks with a limp and rarely speaks. Her left leg and arm are crippled.
In the town of Nabateya, a family of nine, including a mother and 7 children (one a 4-day-old baby), were wiped out by a so-called surgical Israeli strike. The father had left two days earlier to perform pilgrimage in the Holy City of Mecca. The father now has no wife, no children and no home to which to return. American technology, as shown over Lebanon, Iraq and Libya, does work!
Earlier an ambulance with two women and four children received a direct hit. . . American weapons over Muslim and Arab have proven to be effective!
The questions that puzzle every decent human being anywhere on earth are the following:
How can anyone find (this) acceptable for a people, who had themselves experienced many calamities because these refugees chose to remain close to their homes and villages?! How can anyone imagine that people, who had (allegedly) suffered centuries of oppression, are able to target innocent civilians taking shelter in a camp belonging to a UN peace-keeping unit, despite repeated UN personnel's appeals to stop the shelling?!
How can any man or woman comprehend how Jews, who build memorials to remind people of the "holocaust," have the power to drop "smart" bombs over towns and villages inhabited by real people?! How can any individual understand how Jews, who continue to complain (about) Nazi atrocities, have the strength and will to force the evacuation of 100 towns and villages and render the peaceful inhabitants homeless with no food, water, clothing or shelter?!
The Qana is only one in a series of massacres that Israel committed since its illegal creation by the West on Palestinian soil. Israel has shown the entire world that it is always capable, with plenty of American help, of acquiring and using the most sophisticated technology to kill and maim, to orphan and widow, and to destroy and burn people who have done them no harm!
--The Arab Journal, April 18, 1997.
Human Rights Watch, an independently funded organization that conducts investigations worldwide, issued a report on the Israeli "Operation Grapes of Wrath" in Lebanon. According to the May, 1996 report, the Israeli military's war crimes in Lebanon included:
Bombing whole villages without specific military objectives and without regard for civilian casualties;
Specifically targeting the civilians as well as civilian infrastructure, including power stations and water reservoirs;
Deliberately targeting ambulances and civilian vehicles.
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The U.S. State Department has refused to classify the 1996 Qana massacre as an act of Israeli state terrorism. Instead, "Palestinian attacks against Israelis accounted for the second deadliest spate of international terrorism in 1996, behind Sri Lankan terrorism, according to the State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report. More than 50 people died at the hands of Hamas terrorists, including five Americans. The report's findings require the United States to continue barring assistance to seven nations deemed state sponsors of terror, including Syria, Iran, Libya and Sudan. "
QANA, SOUTHERN LEBANON -- It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a gray-haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.
The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area, a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building -- the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters -- a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive -- 206 by last night -- has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 -- the youngest was a four- day-old baby -- when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.
Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250 meters from a UN convoy on which I was traveling, blasting a house 30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Traveling back to Beirut to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on the river bridge north of Sidon.
Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982 doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine.
. . . The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams from the shell-smashed UN compound in which the Shiite Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon -- who had heeded Israel's order to leave their homes -- had pathetically sought shelter. Fijian and French soldiers heaved another group of dead -- they lay with their arms tightly wrapped around each other -- into blankets.
A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms.
And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst into the compound. They had driven in wild convoys down from Tyre and began to pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their mothers and sons and daughters and to shriek Allahu Akbar (God is Great") and to threaten the UN troops.
We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom. One bearded man with fierce eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury. "You are Americans," he screamed at us. "Americans are dogs". You did this. Americans are dogs."
President Bill Clinton has allied himself with Israel in its war against "terrorism," and the Lebanese, in their grief, had not forgotten this. Israel's official expression of sorrow was rubbing salt in their wounds. "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow myself up amid the Israelis," one old man said.
As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that Israelis will pay for their killing of Lebanese civilians, its revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then turn out to be all too aptly named.
Herve de Charette's face was as white as death. The French Foreign Minister, neatly clad in blue suit and tie, had gingerly walked through the scene of last week's massacre at the UN's compound, nodding diplomatically as the UN's Fijian commander described the 12 minutes in which Israeli shells slaughtered up to 120 refugees, the sliced-up corpses that his soldiers were forced to pick up, the difficulty in identifying parts of the children who had been torn to pieces. Mr. de Charette listened with distaste. But then he was confronted by a survivor.
Fawzaya Zrir, a small, frail woman in a scarf, simply walked up to the French Foreign Minister and began talking to him with an odd mixture of affection and anger. "For us, France is our mother and God is our father," she said in a flight of rhetoric that might have been written by the Quai d'Orsay public relations men, who beamed happily at this fortunate encounter.
Then things began to go wrong. "We have lived through hell," Mrs. Zrir continued. "The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs. They bleed, these people. You should have seen the heads."
At the French foreign minister's right, a Lebanese softly translated the woman's dreadful words. The PR men began to look uneasy. "We have lived here 40 years and now we are treated like animals," the woman cried. "Do you know what the dogs did at night after the killings? They were hungry and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people."
Mr. de Charette stared at her as if he had seen a ghost. This had clearly not been part of the programme, a schedule that was supposed to have whisked the foreign minister from a light lunch at UN headquarters in Naqqoura to a photo-opportunity on the roof of the wrecked UN battalion HQ, a three-minutes press conference to give the impression of openness and a swift drive back to the coast and a helicopter to Beirut -- everything, in fact, that would enhance France's much-trumpeted love for Lebanon. Reality had very definitely not been part of the programme.
A UN soldier was quite blunt about it. "This place is going to be turned into one of those awful pilgrimage sites for the great and the good," he muttered. "Boutros-Ghali sent his emissaries today to express their horror. But they'll do no more than they did after Srebrenica. They'll tut-tut and shrug it off. They won't even have the guts to condemn Israel even now -- for this wickedness."
The problem... is that neither America nor Europe is going to condemn a country which pounded refugees of Qana with 155mm shells for 12 minutes; and such condemnation is about the only palliative that the Lebanese might accept for the moment.
And you can see their point. On the coast road back to Beirut last night there were burning cars, civilians deliberately targeted by Israeli warships north of Sidon, three of whom had been badly wounded. Had this being a Syrian warship shelling Israeli civilians on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road, of course, Mr. Clinton himself would have deplored -- rightly -- an act of "international terrorism."
But not a word of criticism about this scandalous targeting of Lebanese civilians was uttered by the foreign ministers of America, Russia, France and Italy as they sought to bring an end to an apparently unstoppable war.
